Less restrictive fluid mixing prevention

[Oktokolo]

TL;DR

Allow using the same fluid network segement with multiple fluids (only one at a time though) without having to remove/place entities.

What?

I would like to be able to have sources for multiple different fluids and consumers attached to the same fluid network. Sources and consumers would be separated by pumps wich would be circuit-controlled. There still could be only one fluid type in each segment of the network at any given time. Pumps would not activate when doing so would lead to fluid mixing. But shutting off all connected pumps and activating one pump connected to a fluid source would make the connected fluid network segment change fluid assignment to whatever fluid the pump provides.
It would be okay if remaining fluid in a fully disconnected (all pumps are off) network segment would just vanish when activating a pump providing another fluid. But having to empty a fluid network segment myself would also be okay.

Why?

Vanilla would profit by beeing able to use the same setup for making solid fuel from all three suitable fluids (would still have to change recipes by hand or use a mod for that).
But the real benefit would be for the heavily modded game where we could build flexible chemical factory blocks wich could automatically switch recipes as needed (recipe-switching by circuit network is available as a mod already, it is the new fluid-mixing-prevention that makes it useless for anything wich would require switching of input or output fluids).

[BlueTemplar]

Yours is not a new suggestion (EDIT : ok, technically, that one was a "bug report"), but I'm going to post here anyway :

I'm sick and tired of the "fluid mixing touching prevention" babysitting me, and getting in the way,
whether in vanilla not being able to pre-pipe water for advanced oil processing,
or not being able to rotate (still unpowered!) chemical assemblers in mods like Py
(and having stuff getting teleported far away in the water when playing PyBlock and moving stuff with Picker Dollies...)

For the love of the Factorio Spaghetti Monster, please add an advanced setting allowing us to disable "fluid mixing touching prevention".
Even if it's also at the cost of disabling fluid parallelism, I'd rather have a choice !

Note that there are tons of mods that allow you to deal better with the fluid spill issues, from before the "fluid mixing touching prevention" was added in 0.17 :
Picker Pipe Tools :
Pipe Cleaner :

Pipe (Auto-)Clamps :

(Pipes can also be clamped manually, using the Ctrl+R shortcut.)




P.S.: Sorry for the image sizes, the resize subtags for img (.gif) don't seem to work, and I haven't been able to find any for .webm...

[Lubricus]

Naah It sounds like an contrived scenario.
I am on the other hand annoyed about not being able to rotate stuff and put down assemblers in wrong direction and then rotate them.

One easy solution to alleviate that problem would be not to lock fluids for machine inputs. And machine inputs can't mix even without the prevention.

[Oktokolo]

Yours is not a new suggestion (EDIT : ok, technically, that one was a "bug report"), but I'm going to post here anyway :

The bug report is about fluid mixing prevention taking fluid input requirements into account. That indeed is an annoyance too, but i can live with it if the devs think, that it helps noobs to get their first oil setup right the first time.
My suggestion is about something completely different and could coexist with the fluid mixing prevention behaviour mentioned above.

For the love of the Factorio Spaghetti Monster, please add an advanced setting allowing us to disable "fluid mixing touching prevention".

I wouldn't be surprised if the ultrafast new fluid simulation would prevent them from having more than one fluid type in one fluid network segment. Don't think, having multiple fluid flow simulation codes in the engine would be a good idea...
But if disabling the fluid mixing prevention is possible i would obviously also take that instead. I never had problems with having to prevent the mixing myself.

Picker Pipe Tools :

Thanks for the link, will use that mod for more space efficient piping.

[BlueTemplar]

One easy solution to alleviate that problem would be not to lock fluids for machine inputs. And machine inputs can't mix even without the prevention.

Machine inputs can throw unused fluid back in the pipes when changing recipes.
In fact I'm often using this feature (at least in early-mid game), as I dislike losing materials (whether in fluid form or not).

[slippycheeze]

For the love of the Factorio Spaghetti Monster, please add an advanced setting allowing us to disable "fluid mixing touching prevention".

I wouldn't be surprised if the ultrafast new fluid simulation would prevent them from having more than one fluid type in one fluid network segment. Don't think, having multiple fluid flow simulation codes in the engine would be a good idea...
But if disabling the fluid mixing prevention is possible i would obviously also take that instead. I never had problems with having to prevent the mixing myself.

Picker Pipe Tools :

Thanks for the link, will use that mod for more space efficient piping.

Yeah, I'm a big fan. The Advanced Fluid Handling mod by the same author (I think) also does a great job of making space-efficient underground piping work well. Technically eliminates an entire class of logistic problems, as clamping does, but practically feels fair and right to me.

Meanwhile, in the real world shipping multiple petroleum products in a single pipeline by either allowing them to mix a bit and using (octane 87 petrol with some octane 93 petrol is fine, so divert the mix into the lower grade) and discarding (incompatible mixes) the small amount of mixture between them, or by using a separable material to split them into packets (well, buffers, in their terms) and routing them appropriately. Water is common.

I'm a little sad I can't do that in Factorio, honestly, but this idea would be pretty nice too.

[BlueTemplar]

I wouldn't be surprised if the ultrafast new fluid simulation would prevent them from having more than one fluid type in one fluid network segment.

Yeah, here's Rseding talking about it in 2017 already :
viewtopic.php?p=270273#p270273

[Oktokolo]

I wouldn't be surprised if the ultrafast new fluid simulation would prevent them from having more than one fluid type in one fluid network segment.

Yeah, here's Rseding talking about it in 2017 already :
viewtopic.php?p=270273#p270273

That system would exhibit instant fluid teleportation from one pipe to all others in the same segment though.
They did not implement that. Instead they requested proposals and picked one that is easy to parallelize and exhibits good and tuneable flow simulation taking friction into account (the proposer even wrote a JavaScript simulation with realtime visualization and tuneable paramters).
But they still have to segment parallel computation of the fluid networks somehow and it probably would complicate matters if there could be more than one fluid type in one such segment. So maybe they curently segment by complete networks. That would then have to be changed to segmentation by the parts of a network fully separated by pumps to make having multiple inputs/outputs of different fluids possible (of wich still only one type could ever be in one segment at the same time).